Outer Dark

“In the morning he heard the tinker’s shoddy carillon long through the woods and he rose and stumbled to the door to see what new evil this might be.”

The use of the word “evil” in the narration of Culla hurrying to send away the tinker reveals that he recognizes the immorality of his incest. At this point in the story, Culla still rules his own domain in his dilapidated cabin, affording him some amount of control over his life. When Culla flees this domain, he loses this control and is at the mercy of those he encounters.

“When he crashed into the glade among the cottonwoods he fell headlong and lay there with his cheek to the earth. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. He would have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’s dread had the child not cried.”

This passage, at the end of the first chapter, is much more baroque than the writing preceding it. McCarthy blends uncommon words and poetic diction to conjure a cosmic image of birth into suffering. Similarly styled passages throughout the novel underline the timeless nature of the story. This passage also foreshadows Culla’s character arc: Just as he thrashes through the swamp in the dark only to find himself back where he started, so too does he travel countless miles only to find himself afflicted by the very problem he was fleeing.

“And her own face still bland and impervious in such wonder he mistook for accusation, silent and inarguable female invective, until he rose and fled, bearing his clenched hands above him threatful, supplicant, to the mute and windy heavens.”

Culla’s misapprehension of Rinthy’s expression exemplifies how he projects his own fears onto the world around him. Ashamed, he assumes Rinthy is accusing him, when she is in fact baffled by his attempted deception. Here, and throughout the novel, Culla thinks God is punishing him. In reality, the heavens are indifferent, “mute and windy.” Culla mistakes his guilt—and the misfortune it causes—as divine retribution.

“It’s old man Salter, one said. Dead. Stobbed and murdered. He nodded. All right, he said. Let’s be for findin the man that done it. And in the glare of the torches nothing of his face visible but the eyes like black agates, nothing of his beard or the suit he wore gloss enough to catch the light and nothing about his hulking dusty figure other than its size to offer why these townsmen should follow him along the road this night.”

In the fourth italicized vignette, a crowd forms around Squire Salter, who was found murdered. The leader of the trio misdirects the crowd toward two itinerant millhands, succeeding in both deflecting suspicion from himself and committing two more murders. The leader’s absolute evil is conveyed in his repellence of all light, a symbol of goodness. Like Satan, the leader of the trio can bend people toward evil.

“Already she could feel it begin warm and damp, sitting there holding her swollen breasts, feeling it in runnels down her belly until she pressed the cloth of her dress against it, looking down at the dark stains.”

Lactation plagues Rinthy, signaling the scandal of her predicament. Here, at a respectable house where she hopes to find work, her lactation forces her to flee, lest she be accused of abandoning her baby. Ironically, Rinthy is physically stained with evidence of her incest, while Culla, guilty of the far worse crime of attempted infanticide, walks free of a physical stain. As a woman in this milieu, Rinthy is more likely to be suspected for trouble with a baby than Culla.

“Even a snake ain’t all bad. They’s put here for some purpose. I believe they’s purpose to everthing. Don’t you believe thataway?”

As always, Culla is uninterested in the philosophical musings of the men he meets on the road. Despite his Christian faith (in Genesis, Satan appears as a snake to tempt Eve), the snake hunter doesn’t malign snakes because he knows they are useful in medicine. Like the other philosophically minded men Culla meets, the snake hunter is interested in discussing good and evil. In this regard, he serves as a foil to Culla, who, in his avoidance of his sin, is uninterested in discussing such things.

“Everbody’s subject to get in a ditch sometime or anothern, Holme said. I ain’t lookin for nobody to be sorry for me.”

This is the most the taciturn Culla speaks at one time in the entire story. He sees his misfortune as unavoidable, something that could happen to anyone, anytime. His reflexive independence is also clear here: He doesn’t want to feel indebted to anyone, a sign of the pride in self-reliance, no matter the cost, that he was raised on.

“After a while he cupped his hands and hallooed into the night. There was not even an echo. His voice fell from his mouth in a chopped bark and he did not call again.”

After the cable snaps, sending Culla adrift down the river, and the spooked horse jumps overboard, the sudden silence brings a change of mood. Culla finds himself smothered by darkness, alone and without bearings in a solipsistic void that symbolizes his existential condition.

“I wouldn’t name him because if you cain’t name somethin you cain’t claim it. You cain’t talk about it even. You cain’t say what it is.”

The importance of names reoccurs as a motif. Rinthy wants to name the child she thinks is dead, but Culla refuses to let her. Here, the leader of the trio expresses Culla’s reason for doing so: Not naming his child was a way of pretending it didn’t exist, a way of avoiding responsibility. The leader is also talking about the third member of the trio, the nameless nonspeaking man. The leader’s words suggest that in his case, there is a power in remaining unnamed.

“You may see the time you wish you had worse, the man said.”

The leader of the trio browbeats Culla into relinquishing his veal-skin boots. He is telling Culla that this is just the start of his punishment: Eventually Culla will stop trying to avoid the misfortune that is retribution for his crimes and, accepting his guilt, beg for more punishment.

“I just want my chap, she said.

Do ye now?

 You said I could work it out.

 They’s work and they’s work, the tinker said. He rose to his knees and  reached down the whiskey and set it before him.

  I’ll do just whatever, she said. I ain’t got nothin else to do.

  The tinker smiled.”

The tinker insinuates that he would trade Rinthy’s child for sex; this likely isn’t a serious proposition but a test of Rinthy’s supposed virtue in his eyes. The ambiguity of Rinthy’s response leaves it to question whether she notices the tinker’s insinuation. However, whether or not she offers sex doesn’t matter. The tinker thinks he’s unmasking Rinthy’s immorality when, in using her child to extort her for sex, he’s revealing his own.

“Hard people makes hard times. I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away.”

Here again the motif of the extinguishment of the sun reappears. In Culla’s nightmare, this motif signifies the disappearance of salvation. A world without the sun is a world without light, and light is the first creation God identifies as good in Genesis. Humanity’s evil pervades the novel like a sickness, raising the issues of why God would allow such evil and why he wouldn’t forsake humanity for committing it. These are the unanswerable questions that plague the characters in Outer Dark.

“Yes, the tinker said. He’s the one would of laid it to early rest save my bein there. Cause I knowed. Sickness. He’s got a sickness.”

This is the only time someone outside of Rinthy and the trio acknowledges Culla’s crimes. The tinker provides some moral perspective in the largely amoral world of the novel. The tinker, who in the milieu of the novel isn’t moral—selling pornography, drinking whiskey, and (it’s implied) hiring sex workers—here condemns Culla for leaving his child to die.

“He could hear it far over the cold and smoking fields of autumn, his pans knelling in the night like buoys on some dim and barren coast, and he could hear it fading and hear it die lost as the cry of seabirds in the vast and salt black solitudes they keep.”

Again, McCarthy uses poetic language to convey the depths of human emotion. After the tinker refuses to return Rinthy’s child, she wails in grief as he flees. Her wail pursues the tinker for longer than it realistically could, and this hyperbole conveys the enormity of Rinthy’s grief. When her wail dies, the imagery of seabirds evokes the desolate isolation Rinthy enters, devoid of the hope that illuminated her life.

“The drovers all had sought shelter among the trees and Holme could see a pair of them watching the herd pass with looks of indolent speculation, leaning upon their staves and nodding in mute agreement as if there were some old injustice being righted in this spectacle of headlong bedlam.”

The drovers see meaning in the deadly stampede of their hogs, or at least Culla reads this into their expressions. The drovers with their staves have an antediluvian quality that supports the idea of “some old injustice” being corrected. Further biblical connotation is provided by the word “bedlam,” which in addition to meaning total confusion is an obsolete spelling of Bethlehem.

“In a world darksome as this’n I believe a blind man ort to be better sighted than most. ”

The dubious preacher is, somewhat ironically, talking about the deceptiveness of appearances. In his view, the blind are better able to see because they can’t be fooled by appearances. McCarthy makes this irony a motif, illustrating how sighted people like Culla and Rinthy can nonetheless be blind to the nature of their condition.

“The drovers against the pale sky were small, erect, simian shapes […] after a while they were very small and then they turned and went on along the bluff with no order rank or valence to anything in the shapen world.”

Again the motif of shadow and silhouette reveals the reality hidden behind appearances. The reverend and the drovers, seen as a group of men moments prior, now appear as apes, two-dimensional and disordered. Their silhouettes betray the atavistic violence hidden behind the thin artifice of their words. They are violent creatures made insignificant by their landscape.

“What discordant vespers do the tinker’s goods chime through the long twilight and over the brindled forest road, him stooped and hounded through the windy recrements of day like those old exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema. Hounded by grief, by guilt, or like this cheerless vendor clamored at heel through wood and fen by his own querulous and inconsolable wares in perennial tin malediction.”

In another of McCarthy’s poetic passages, the tinker appears even further divorced from a particular setting than is typical in the novel. He’s described as a timeless figure (an “old exile”) condemned to wander in limbo, between heaven and hell, hated and traceless (“spoorless”). Rinthy and Culla are the other old exiles: Rinthy is hounded by grief, Culla by guilt. The tinker is pursued by the sound of his own wares, which clank “in perennial tin malediction”—an unshakeable curse. The tinker is a prisoner in a cage partially of his own design.

“I never give nobody nothin. I never had nothin.

Never figured nothin, never had nothin, never was nothin, the man said.”

The leader of the trio taunts Culla for his lifelong destitution. Culla’s default is to disavow connection to anything outside himself in the hope that this will free him from responsibility. As the leader says, Culla is also loath to think about anything because doing so risks confronting his self-deception.

“What do you want with him? Holme said.

 Nothin. No more than you do.

 He ain’t nothin to me.”

In an allusion to the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, the bearded leader asks Culla to give him his son as a sacrifice. Culla agrees not out of faith, like Abraham, but out of indifference, disowning his child. As Culla’s shadow, the leader wields the knife for him (even drawing it from the boot stolen from Culla), executing what Culla himself wanted but couldn’t bring himself to do outright. However, the leader gives him a chance to intervene and save his child, putting him in the position of God in Abraham’s sacrifice. Shirking his chance to intervene is a statement of nihilism: The life that Culla should find precious is worthless to him.

“She waited all through the blue twilight and into the dark. Bats came and went. Wind stirred the ashes and the tinker in his tree turned slowly but no one returned. Shadows grew cold across the wood and night rang down upon these lonely figures and after a while little sister was sleeping.”

Rinthy’s story ends with her being consumed by shadow and darkness, suggesting that after her long struggle, the world has finally crushed her. This is the third time Rinthy is called “little sister,” an epithet that emphasizes her youth and innocence amid the ubiquitous decay of the novel while reminding the reader of the suffering Culla inflicts on his little sister.

“He went on, soundless with his naked feet, shambling, gracelorn, down out of the peaceful mazy fields, his toed tracks soft in the dust among the cratered shapes of horse and mule hoofs and before him under the high afternoon sun his shadow be-wandered in a dark parody of his progress.”

Culla is shoeless at the end of his story, signifying how his wandering has exposed him to more and more suffering. Rinthy also loses her shoes on her journey, but she does much earlier than Culla, indicating her relentless determination to find her child. McCarthy’s neologism, gracelorn, connotes both “forlorn” and “graceless,” ascribing a unique set of emotions to the pauperized Culla. Finally, his shadow betrays his true condition, showing that the progress he makes along the road isn’t true progress.

“A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place.”

There is no god to reward goodness in the world of the novel—indeed, many who do good suffer tragic fates—however, there’s a kind of anti-Christ in the trio that punishes Culla for his sins. Culla thinks he manages to escape darkness, however, this passage shows that Culla does not escape punishment. The road he follows for the length of the novel leads to a dead end. This view of desolation doesn’t give him the existential vantage he needs. Failing this realization, all there is to do is to return the way he came.